‘Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius,’ by Bill Pennington

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By Maxwell Carter

June 5, 2015

They were both All-Star Yankee infielders, won five championships apiece in their playing days, and have yet to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame (though one of them is surely on his way). Derek Jeter and Billy Martin share this much — and little else. Jeter was the game’s ice-cold ambassador. Martin, who may be the only manager to have thrown dirt at an umpire, was anything but. Jeter’s self-effacing persona positioned his success front and center. Martin’s histrionics nudged his achievements offstage, madness overshadowing the method. In “Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius,” the New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington gives long-overdue flesh to the caricature.

Billy was born Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., in hardscrabble West Berkeley, Calif. Abandoned by his womanizing father, Martin was raised by his strong-willed, diminutive mother, Jenny, for whom, one daughter recalls, “swearing was like breathing.” When he wasn’t scrapping, the young Martin could be found playing baseball at James Kenney Park, the neighborhood’s ­“oasis of refinement.”

Friends marveled at his dawn-to-dusk dedication. Bill Rigney, an All-Star infielder with the New York Giants, never forgot the dogged youngster: “He wasn’t like the other kids. . . . He wasn’t just passing the time or showing off.” Martin’s senior season in high school established a familiar pattern. He hit .450 and earned all-county honors, but he was kicked off the team for fighting. Later in life, Martin considered the punishment the “most unfair thing that could have happened.” The lesson, sadly, had gone unlearned.

Martin soon caught on with the Idaho feeder squad of Casey Stengel’s Oakland Oaks (or, the minor league of the minor leagues). The Oaks owner, Brick Laws, sought contractual safeguards against Martin’s “misbehavior.” Martin refused. Laws gave in, unaware of just how raw his new recruit was. Martin was asked to wear a suit for the trip to Idaho Falls, but said he didn’t own one: “My family took my only suit and used it to dress my uncle in his casket last year.” Here, as elsewhere, Pennington knows when to give Martin the floor and when to raise an eyebrow. He tells us that Martin’s sister scuttled the additional claim that his only suitcase had been pawned.

Martin progressed to the Oaks in 1947, and Stengel’s “Nine Old Men” (echoing the nickname of the Supreme Court) became “Eight Old Men and the Kid.” The 1948 Oaks clicked, going 111-74, good for the Pacific Coast League title. In the off-season Stengel was hired to manage the Yankees. The following October, they acquired Martin, reuniting mentor and protégé.

Martin wasn’t merely fulfilling his childhood dream of playing major league baseball in New York, he was joining one of the sport’s great dynasties. The Yankees would be World Series champs from 1949 to 1953. Martin’s roommates alone would win more than half the decade’s American League Most Valuable Player awards — Phil Rizzuto (1950), Yogi Berra (1951, 1954, 1955) and Mickey Mantle (1956, 1957). Driving hard on the field and off, he grew especially close with Mantle and the pitcher Whitey Ford. The convivial group came to be known as the “Three Musketeers.” Martin, who wore jersey No. 1, embodied the team’s “elemental purpose,” which was winning. His fearless attitude and heads-up catch in Game 7 of the 1952 World Series — Mantle called it the “greatest” he had ever seen — endeared him to teammates and fans alike.

The general manager, George Weiss, wasn’t quite as enamored, even as the Yankee front office was being celebrated: Weiss was named the Sporting News Executive of the Year four times (not 10, as Pennington writes). The infractions of the other Musketeers were overlooked, but Martin, whose statistics never reflected his value, didn’t have their leeway. In 1957, his involvement in an altercation with patrons at the Copacabana, an upscale New York supper club, sealed his fate. (Berra’s recollection was: “Nobody did nothing to nobody.”) Weiss traded him the next month to the Kansas City Athletics.

Martin played for five other teams before retiring with the Minnesota Twins at age 32. When he returned to manage the Twins in 1969, he resumed his itinerant course. Despite winning the division in three of his first four managerial stops, he wasn’t able to go three seasons without either resigning or being fired — sometimes both. With Martin came not only triple steals and wily objections to the use of pine tar, but also dirt-shrouded ejections and barroom brawls. His five ­headline-grabbing stints with the Yankees, beginning in 1975, were extravagant testimony to life under Billy Martin. As Graig Nettles, the team’s third baseman, cracked: “Some kids want to play big-league baseball, and other kids want to run away and join a circus. I’m lucky; I get to do both here.” And then there were Martin’s headlong personal affairs. He was married four times — settling down wasn’t in his nature.

His seasons with the Yankees have been more than ably covered. Jonathan Mahler’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning” (2005) conjured New York in 1977 through its culture, politics and irresistibly dysfunctional Yankee team. Roger Kahn’s “October Men” (2003) followed the 1978 season and a 14-game comeback-for-the-ages, clinched by Bucky Dent’s go-ahead home run in the playoff tiebreaker against the Red Sox. Pennington’s treatment of these years is every bit as good, particularly Martin’s soap operatic relationships with George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson.

How will Martin be remembered? He was, by turns, one of baseball’s finest minds and an alcoholic “desperado.” He chaffed and charmed, fought and philandered. His family scarcely knew what to make of him. In the late 1980s, his daughter, Kelly Ann, recalled her own daughter’s cartoonish perception: “When people ask Evie what her grandfather does, she used to say that he kicks dirt on people. Now she just says, ‘He gets fired.’ ” In “Billy Martin,” Pennington savors the dirt-kicking spectacles without losing sight of the man.

Maxwell Carter writes frequently on popular culture for the Book Review and other publications.